CARING AS CAREER - AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE FOR EDUCATIONAL-ADMINISTRATION

The primary purpose of this article is to describe how school administ rators operating from an ethic of care conduct their daily practice an d how that practice differs from administrators operating solely from traditional leadership models. Via a secondary analysis of data that w ere gathered in our previous work with career assistant principals, we show how the practices of these assistant principals do not fit tradi tional administrative theories. Instead, the ethic of care was evident . Because it is difficult to separate administrative practice from org anizational structure and professional norms, a secondary purpose of t his article is to identify how the demands of both the organization an d the profession interfere with enactment of caring.